Last Chance to See

balloon on the end.
    She frowned at it, but still didn’t get the idea. She brought us a wooden spoon, a candle, a sort of paper knife, and, surprisingly enough, a small porcelain model of the Eiffel Tower and then at last lapsed into a posture of defeat.
    Some other girls from the stall gathered round to help, but they were also defeated by our picture. At last I plucked up the bravado to perform a delicate little mime and at last the penny dropped.
    “Ah!” the first girl said, suddenly wreathed in smiles. “Ah yes!”
    They all beamed delightedly at us as they got the idea.
    “You do understand?” I asked.
    “Yes! Yes, I understand.”
    “Do you have any?”
    “No,” she said. “Not have.”
    “Oh.”
    “But, but, but …”
    “Yes?”
    “I say you where you go, okay?”
    “Thank you very much. Thank you.”
    “You go 616 Nanjing Road. Okay. Have there. You ask ‘rubberover.’ Okay?”
    “Rubberover?”
    “Rubberover. You ask. They have. Okay. Have nice day.” She giggled happily about this with her hand over her mouth.
    We thanked them again, profusely, and left with much waving and smiling. The news seemed to have spread very quickly around the store, and everybody waved at us. They seemed terribly pleased to have been asked.
    When we reached 616 Nanjing Road, which turned out to be another, smaller department store, and not a knocking shop as we had been half-suspecting, our pronunciation of “rubberover” seemed to let us down and produce another wave of baffled incomprehension.
    This time I went straight for the mime that had served us so well before, and it seemed to do the trick at once. The shop assistant, a middle-aged lady with severe hair, marched straight to a cabinet of drawers, brought us back a packet, and placed it triumphantly on the counter in front of us.
    Success, we thought. But then we opened the packet and found it to contain a bubble sheet of pills.
    “Right idea,” said Mark with a sigh. “Wrong method.”
    We were quickly floundering again as we tried to explain to the now slightly affronted lady that it wasn’t precisely what we were after. By this time a crowd of about fifteen onlookers had gathered around us, some of whom, I was convinced, had followed us all the way from the Friendship Store.
    One of the things that you quickly discover in China is that we are all at the zoo. If you stand still for a minute, people will gather round and stare at you. The unnervingthing is that they don’t stare intently or inquisitively, they just stand there, often right in front of you, and watch you as blankly as if you were a dog-food commercial.
    At last a young and pasty-faced man with glasses pushed through the crowd and said he spoke a little English and could he help?
    We thanked him and said yes, we wanted to buy some condoms, some “rubberovers,” and we would be very grateful if he could explain that for us.
    He looked puzzled, picked up the rejected packet lying on the counter in front of the affronted shop assistant, and said, “Not want rubberover. This better.”
    “No,” Mark said. “We definitely want rubberover, not pills.”
    “Why want rubberover? Pill better.”
    “You tell him,” said Mark.
    “It’s to record dolphins,” I said. “Or not the actual dolphins in fact. What we want to record is the noise in the Yangtze that … It’s to go over the microphone, you see, and …”
    “Oh, just tell him you want to fuck someone,” muttered Chris Scottishly. “And you can’t wait.”
    But by now the young man was edging nervously away from us, suddenly realising that we were dangerously insane and should simply be humoured and escaped from. He said something hurriedly to the shop assistant and backed away into the crowd.
    The shop assistant shrugged, scooped up the pills, opened another drawer, and pulled out a packet of condoms.
    We bought nine, just to be on the safe side.
    “They’ve got aftershave as well,” said Mark, “if you’re running out.”
    I had already managed to dispose of one bottle of aftershave in the hotel in Beijing, and I hid another under the seat on the train to Nanjing.
    “You know what you’re doing?” said Mark as he spotted me. I’d thought he was asleep.
    “Yes. I’m trying to get rid of this bloody stuff. I wish I’d never bought it.”
    “No, it’s more than that. When an animal strays into new territory, where it doesn’t feel at home, it marks its passage with scent, just to lay claim. You